Conversations about Software Engineering

Alex Bramley continuous his conversation with Sven Johann. They begin with how granular you should monitor your user journeys and then discuss error budget policies in depth. They continue on how to iterate on SLIs, SLOs and error budget policies. They close the conversation with SLO alerting.

Alex Bramley continuous his conversation with Sven Johann. They start with what external and internal dependencies do with your availability requirements and how you calculate availability if you have a microservices dependency tree. They look into how you can introduce SLOs to your organisation. After that, they switch to measure user happiness with your monitoring system, measurement windows and how to report those results.

Alex Bramley talks to Sven Johann about the basics of service level objectives. They begin with terminologies (SLI, SLO, SLA, Error Budget), look at costs of outages and discuss what reliability has to do with customer happiness. They continue with having 100% reliability is the wrong target and what’s possibly the right target. Alex then explains how to get started with collecting data about your system’s behaviour. They close the first part of this series by looking into latency SLIs.

Simon Brown talks to Stefan Tilkov about software architecture – the importance for developers, its role in agile software development, documentation and tooling, and the importance (or lack of importance) of UML.

Eoin Woods discusses with Sven Johann all the things developers need to know to bring systems successfully into production and how to keep them there. They discuss production environments, what goes wrong in production, architectural requirements for operations, cost of very high availability, stability and capacity, communicating operational concerns, observability, learning from incidents, chaos engineering and operational models (SRE, You build it, you run it, classic).

In this episode, Stefan talks to software developer Christin Gorman about her experience with very large software projects and the reasons why they fail, especially in the public sector. The two address issues of size, approaches that do and don’t work, share some of their favorite failure stories and try to enumerate some strategies to do something about them.

In this episode, Artur Ortega explains to Stefan Tilkov what GraphQL is, how it came to be, and how it differs from REST. Predictably, the two debate whether it’s better or not, but also spend some time going over its technical details and applicability to different usage scenarios.

In this episode, Markus Völter talks with Stefan Tilkov about language engineering and its connection to domain-driven design. Picking up from their past interactions in various different podcasts, the two agree and disagree fundamentally in equal parts, on topics such as the usefulness of DSLs, the costs and benefits of domain experts writing code, and the tradeoffs of various architectural approaches.

Birgitta Böckeler talks with Sven Johann about cultivating architecture principles. They first discuss what architecture principles are, why they are useful, how they are structured and how they help to guide decision making across multiple teams. They then talk about their lifecycle: who creates them, checks if they are aligned with business goals, prioritizes them, how they should be communicated, how you know they are useful and when to potentially retire them.

Joy Heron talks with Rachel Andrew about CSS Layout. Rachel shares her journey as a web developer and how the web has changed over that time. They discuss Rachel’s work with the CSS working group and how developers can get involved to improve the web for the future. Rachel also talks about the current status of CSS layout and what we can expect in the near future. To wrap up, Rachel shares some practical tips and they discuss the future of the web platform.